Outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok has arrived in Bosnia for a three-day surprise visit that will take him to Srebrenica, the site of a wartime massacre for which the Netherlands has taken responsibility.
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Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok visits a refugee collective centre in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Photograph: Reuters
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The visit comes less than two months after Mr Kok announced his government would resign over the atrocity, acknowledging that Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to protect the enclave when 7,500 Muslims were massacred by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995.
The Dutch royal information service said Mr Kok is due to visit the site on Thursday.
The prime minister announced his departure from politics, after eight years in office, following the publication of a five-year inquiry into the massacre which found that the Dutch government and military leaders, as well as the United Nations, had set up a mission that was doomed to fail.
The government-commissioned report concluded that "humanitarian motivation and political ambitions drove The Netherlands to undertake an ill-conceived and virtually impossible peace mission."
AFP